The Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard (also known as MPEG-DASH) is a state of the art adaptive video streaming standard. It enables high quality streaming of media content over the internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. The standard breaks the content into a sequence of small HTTP-based file segments, with each segment containing a short interval of media. These short segments may be requested and played back in sequence to yield a playback time of several hours.
In the DASH standard, the client selects which segments it wants from the servers it wants to use. The servers return the requested segments and the client device plays the segments.